After starting the season 6-1, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have stalled out and started to roll backward in a hurry.
Injuries have played a role in this but those missing pieces have also highlighted something else that has caused mass frustration among fans. Coaching is always easy to call into question when arm chairing from home, but Todd Bowles has made it so unbelievably easy to pick on him and call his mistakes out.
Those injuries have depleted his defense, but his reluctance to try something different to account for them is pure stubbornness. It's something Bucs fans have been calling out for a while, and it didn't take long for the Thursday Night Football crew to pick up on it too.
Kirk Herbstreit says the quiet part out loud about what's wrong with the Bucs defense
One specific source of frustration has been the unwillingness to shift away from soft zone coverage. It's something that once again killed the Bucs on defense in Week 15 and was easily figured out by Zac Robinson and the Falcons offense.
During the broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, Kirk Herbstreit pretty bluntly said what every Buccaneers fan has been screaming at Todd Bowles for years.
"Man I tell you, that zone is not working out tonight for Tampa underneath," Herbstreit pointed out. "Whether it's Bijan Robinson or it's Kyle Pitts."
Both of those guys gashed the Bucs all night, especially Pitts in the first half. Only twice in his career has Pitts turned in a game with multiple scores and both of them have come against Tampa Bay's defense.
It points to something even deeper than what Herbstreit was getting at -- Todd Bowles simply refuses to make adjustments and alter his defensive play calling. He's shown masterclasses in the past in shutting down offenses, notably in the Super Bowl against Patrick Mahomes, but that was five years ago. Ever since then it feels like we've been living off the fumes of that truly iconic performance -- and it was biblical -- but times have changed even if Bowles hasn't.
He's allowed to run the type of defense he wants, but it's a constant gamble that the pieces he has on the field are going to be able to make up the difference in talent missing, either due to injury or simply not having the right guys.
It's a boom-or-bust style, which is why we've seen so many big plays allowed while also watching the Bucs play smothering defense at times. There's no consistency, though, outside of the fact that the zone defense is ripe to get picked apart by guys like Kyle Pitts when it absolutely shouldn't be the case.